“Something is unwinding. I can’t know how things will go in the time I have left. I can’t predict what will happen. My grief won’t end, but it will keep changing. I imagine myself sitting on Paul’s grave looking at his stone. I imagine the early May bloom as it was when we buried him, the cemetery wide-awake with color, and I think of Joyce’s Bloom, and I remember a wedding in Brooklyn on Bloomsday in June when the thunder sounded and the lightning flashed, and I think of Paul’s Anna Blume pushing her cart in the city that’s falling apart and my own Violet Bloom in What I Loved, dressed in the clothes of her beloved Bill after he dies. ... I held Paul’s face when he was dying, and I talked about the fun we had, all the fun, and he heard me. And, after he died, it hailed.”

– Siri Hustvedt, Ghost Stories: A Memoir

I remember when Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was first published in France. Its lonely, existentialist voice resonated deeply and Auster was adopted by the French long before he became famous in the U.S.. We do that sometimes. 

I remember being knocked out by Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, living in Montreal and genuinely obsessed with the literary duo living in Brooklyn, the dark-haired Jewish writer and the white blond intellectual beauty posing on their front steps, the epitome of cool. 

And now we have this book which takes us right inside the house. A book of light and darkness. A book of ghosts, imagined and real. A book of letters. A book of love, tested and tried and reignited. 

What Siri Hustvedt accomplished here is a tour de force. Like Philipe Petit, the French high-wire artist who crossed a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974, she tiptoes above the void with her broken heart in one hand and her blazing intellect in the other, and gives us her stories like a most precious offering.

Their two lives entwined like branches, reflected in each other’s works like leitmotifs, creating a third entity as thick and fragile as coastal fog. 

Gather your tears. Rejoice in these pages. 

I doubt we will ever meet such a fated pair again. 

Mélanie Francès Hutson was born in Paris, France. She grew up in Europe but lived for four years in New Delhi, India, as a child. As a college student, she discovered her gift for writing and developed an interest in the arts and American literature. She later moved to Montreal, Canada to pursue her graduate studies at Concordia University and obtained an M.A. Degree in English and Creative Writing. In 2001, she published her first chapbook of poetry, The World is in your Head, with Ginninderra Press in Australia. In 2008, she published her collection of poems Anatomy of a Love Affair (My Life in the Movies) with Salmon Poetry in Ireland. She now lives in Maryland where she is currently raising her son Noah and writing about books on Instagram at @mybookhunter.